It's particularly egregious given AT&T fought an infamously protracted legal battle against the United States Government to try to avoid being forced to be broken up (entirely against their will). They exhausted a lot of money and time trying to avoid the scenario the op is claiming they were trying to intentionally execute.

I thought it was pretty obvious that they weren’t taking AT&T’s side in that comment.

The comments you are responding to aren't referencing AT&T as egregious, but the misrepresentation of AT&T's intentions, given that AT&T desired the polar opposite of what the court ordered them to do, which was to split up. The above commenter was trying to portray AT&T as getting their way by splitting up, as if that was their devious intention all along.

I have a hard time parsing the position of the comment in question. As if allowed was just an unfortunate choice of word.

The sentence before allowed had a bunch of stuff about Ronald Reagan and I wanted to avoid the political aspect.

In any event, the whole thing went down and was determined long before Reagan took office. The case was filed under the Ford administration and prosecuted mainly by the Carter administration. By the time Reagan took office the case had been in progress for nearly a decade, and he had been president for barely a year when the final decision was handed down.

OP just has so much confused about this chapter of history.

Thanks for your comment. Maybe I’m wrong in that part. Your link sadly doesn’t work and shows an 404. I’m a little confused because the Wikipedia says:

    AT&T itself recommended a divestiture structure in which it would be broken up into regional subsidiaries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._AT%26T_(1982)

This is getting caught by your parents and responding when they ask you to name your punishment. It was hardly voluntary.

>The FCC also found evidence during this period that AT&T was overcharging consumers for physical products that had been manufactured by its equipment subsidiary Western Electric, which was itself a monopoly, and using the resulting monopoly profits to subsidize its landline network operations, which was a violation of antitrust law.[5]

These developments, along with an appreciation of new technologies and business models for telephone service that were becoming available, convinced American regulators that AT&T should no longer be tolerated as the natural monopoly in that marketplace.[6] A plan to break up the company into smaller components was proposed by the United States Department of Justice starting in 1974, citing authority under the Sherman Antitrust Act to reduce the power of a monopoly firm.[1] AT&T itself recommended a divestiture structure in which it would be broken up into regional subsidiaries.

Given the context it seems they were fried anyway and were just able to negotiate how the split would be done

the link is working for me. it's showing a court opinion

Still :(

    Google Scholar
    404. That's an error.
    Sorry, no content found 
    for this URL
    That's all we know.